Retirement
by Rose Stetson
Summary: Maxon has a surprise for America. Will she be able to keep a straight-face long enough to enjoy it?


"Okay, I'm coming out!" Maxon announced, his voice echoing from the closet in our new suite. As bittersweet as it had been to leave the rooms which had become Maxon's and my sanctuaries for our entire married life, I was more than happy to finally have a single suite which I could share with my husband. "Don't laugh!"

I looked down at Osten who had somehow managed to scrunch himself into my lap the way he had as a small boy. He grinned, a sparkle of mischief twinkling in the eyes he had inherited from his father.

"No promises!" I called back with a playful smile tugging at my lips.

For the first time in nearly a decade, my hair fell down around my shoulders, almost entirely untamed except for the pins which my maid had carefully put in my hair.

If I didn't have Kaden and Osten here to remind me of my age, I would have believed myself seventeen again. I certainly felt that young today.

"What are we not laughing at?" Kaden asked, leaning over to me so that Maxon wouldn't hear his query.

"I have no idea," I said with a chuckle. "He wouldn't even tell me."

Osten snickered. "That should tell you something about how silly it's going to be."

I bit back a laugh as Kaden grimaced. Osten knew his father all too well. I was afraid that I was likely going to be laughing hardest of all.

A shadow moved in the closet, and I clapped enthusiastically. "Come on, Maxon!"

"Go, Dad!" Kaden shouted with an uncharacteristic holler.

"Do these things really have holes sewn into them?"

I didn't think Maxon had meant for anyone but his butler to hear the question, but his question sent Osten rolling off my lap and onto the floor in laughter.

There was a muffled response, and Kaden turned a bewildered look toward me, a smile growing from watching Osten's antics.

"Maxon, for heaven's sake, just get it over with!" I called, cupping my hands around my mouth.

He peeked his head around the closet door, and I could see his visible unease. "You promise you won't laugh?" he pleaded again.

I raised my right hand. "I swear that even if you come out wearing a full clown ensemble, I will not laugh." I paused, thinking through the words before I amended them. "Loudly." I considered my promise again. "In front of you."

There. That was it. I could promise that much.

Maxon groaned. "That's it. I'm putting these away."

"These?" Kaden asked, his eyebrows shooting up. "How many things are you showing off?"

"Dad, come out!" Osten cried, rolling right into an upright position. "We'll be nice."

Maxon guffawed as if he couldn't imagine Osten making a promise without breaking it, at least not when it came to jokes of any kind.

I had to laugh when Osten merely shrugged. "It was worth a shot."

"The longer you wait, the harder it's going to be to keep a straight face," I warned, an affectionate smile playing on my lips as I got up off the bed. "Do you want me to come and take a look before you have to face the boys?"

"No!"

All three of the men in my room refused my sneak peek.

"Who do you think I got these blasted things for?" Maxon asked as he walked out of the closet.

I just stared in disbelief at my husband, blinking as if stunned by the sight before me. My husband, former King of Illéa, stood in front of me wearing a light blue dress shirt, untucked from the waist of his pants.

I couldn't ever remember seeing my husband fully dressed and yet simultaneously this casual before.

"Dad, are you—are you wearing—are you wearing jeans?" Kaden stammered.

I realized with a start that Kaden was absolutely right. Maxon wasn't just wearing his shirt untucked. He was actually wearing a brand-new pair of dark wash denim jeans, some frayed holes carefully applied to the knee and the hip pocket of his pants.

"Is it bad?" he asked, his face grimacing as he looked down at his ensemble.

"So weird," Osten murmured, mesmerized.

"America?"

I forced myself to look back up at my husband whose eyebrows were knitted together in concern. "Hmm?"

"I should change, right?" he asked, grimacing as he looked down at his outfit. "I mean, it's not me."

I swallowed as I turned to my sons. "Boys, don't you have studying to do?"

Osten immediately found his way to his feet. "Mo-om!" he whined.

"I was going to call Ahren and see if he could help me with my French," Kaden said with a shrug as he walked toward the front door.

He grabbed Osten by the arm and pulled him toward the exit.

"What do you think they're talking about?" Maxon asked as he watched them whisper back and forth before Osten shuddered and they both exited the room.

"If you have to ask that, it's been way too long since I had to hint for the kids to leave before I had some time alone with you," I murmured as I turned a wink toward my husband.

I wish I could admit that it didn't surprise me when my husband of the last twenty-some-odd years blushed, but oh, what a satisfying surprise it was.

"America?" he asked, eyeing me as if he wasn't sure what to think.

"What on earth possessed you to buy a pair of jeans?" I asked with a laugh as I walked closer to him. "I mean, twenty years of marriage, and I don't remember getting even a hint that you ever wanted to wear jeans."

"Well," he said with a sigh as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. "I guess as we were moving into this suite, I got to thinking."

"Thinking about what?" I asked, a little uncertain of where this conversation was going to take us. I was married to a brilliant man, but more than once, I had found myself wondering about the limits of his brilliance.

He smiled as he reached out and touched my hair. "I love it when you wear your hair down like this."

The compliment went straight to my heart, but still, I turned to my husband. "What does that have to do with anything?"

He took my hand and walked me over to the wall which had been appropriated for his photography. "I remembered the first time you came to my room and saw my pictures," he said, looking up at the sheer number of stills which represented our life together. "I remembered how excited you were when you realized I would have been a Five if we had both chosen our professions."

I wrapped my other hand around his and leaned in close to his shoulder, kissing it gently.

He turned a grin to me as he let go of my hand and wrapped his arm around my waist, pulling me closer even still. As my hip brushed his, he encircled my waist with his other arm and held me.

"It's always been my favorite wall of our rooms," I admitted as I leaned my cheek against his shoulder.

"Mine too," he said with a grin. He turned me to face him as he looked down at carefully tailored denim pants. "I guess I remembered that we could have been Fives together, and then I remembered getting you a pair of jeans just because you were a Five, and my butler guessed that Fives would usually wear jeans."

"He was right," I murmured, thinking fondly of the jeans Maxon had bought me even when I had lost the bet that May would cry when she tasted the strawberry tarts. "And those were exceptionally comfortable jeans."

Maxon grinned. "Well, in the spirit of nostalgia," he said as he turned back toward the closet. "You should probably open this."

He pulled out a white box, quite reminiscent of the box I'd found in my room twenty years ago. The teasing smile fell from my face as I took the gift in my hands. "Maxon, are you saying that you bought me another pair of jeans?"

"Why don't you take a look?" He put his hands on my hips as I put the box on the bed and opened it.

There, nestled in soft white tissue paper, was a pair of dark-wash denim blue jeans. "Oh, Maxon," I breathed, somewhat embarrassed to find that I had tears moistening my eyes at the gift.

I turned in his embrace and wrapped my arms around his neck. His strong arms held me tightly as our lips met in a kiss. I smiled against his lips as I began running my fingers through his hair, and his kisses started trailing down my cheek and into the crook of my neck.

I giggled with each little tickle, a thousand tender moments shared with this wonderful husband of mine. Each moment with him bringing not just a hundred new memories, but reminding me of hundreds of moments I hadn't thought of in years.

His fingers worked their magic on the buttons of my blouse as I prepared to fall back with him onto the bed.

But as I was about to fall backward and bring him with me, it all stopped.

My brain was still in a daze as Maxon pulled away, his face turned away from mine, his expression unreadable.

"Maxon?" I asked, self-consciously trying to right my appearance.

Had he seen something I hadn't? A butler or a maid? Had the boys turned around to ask us something? It wouldn't be the first time that someone had ruined the mood by walking in at an inopportune time.

I looked down to try and fix my blouse when I saw the incision scar from my open-heart surgery. Maxon's kisses had stopped right about there, I realized as the fog lifted from my brain. Maxon had taken one look at my scar and become disinterested in me.

I tried to brush away my feeling of disappointment as I refastened the buttons of my blouse. Twenty years of marriage, and apparently, I had finally become repulsive to my husband. It hadn't even occurred to me until now, but between my doctor's orders and the demands of Eadlyn's coronation, this was the closest we'd come to being intimate since the heart attack.

I swallowed down the hurt and shame that I felt. It hadn't been my choice to have a heart attack, to be born with a defective life-sustaining organ. But though it hadn't been my choice, I couldn't help but think that I would rather my father have an ugly scar on his chest than to be gone. I certainly felt that I'd rather have a few more years with my family than worry about the perfection of my youthful body.

Why didn't my husband feel the same way?

"Is it—" I breathed the question, but stilled myself as I realized how little I really wanted to know the answer, but I couldn't just stand here as if I were some secret lover he was ashamed to see. I needed to know what it was that made me so untouchable after my heart attack. "Is my scar really that ugly?"

Maxon turned to me, and I was surprised to find his eyes red-rimmed with tears. "Ugly?" he whispered as he reached for my hand. "Is that what you think? That after twenty years of asking you to look past the scars on my back, I can't look at the scar from your surgery?"

I couldn't speak, and he didn't seem to need me to because he put a finger under my chin and brought my face to look up at him. "It's just a reminder that things aren't ever going to be the same. I'm always going to worry about what's going to take you from me in a way I never really did before."

His face was lined with pain as he continued. "What I wouldn't give for that part of our youth again."

"To be fair, we weren't quite as invincible in our youth," I said in an attempt to ease the tension.

A ghost of a smile appeared on Maxon's features, but they didn't light up his eyes. "A grazed bullet wound was no picnic, but I was kicking myself for my idiocy so much more than I was worrying about you actually dying." He bit the inside of his cheek as he walked with me to the bed and we sat on the edge of it. "I don't know if this is how you felt when I was shot that Christmas. I don't know that either of us really could have felt this way back then since we've been through so much more now."

I nodded in understanding.

"America, when I was shot," his voice hitched. "When I thought I was about to die, all I could think of was all of the things I wanted from our lives, all of these future moments for us that I would have loved to share with you. It was like bittersweet gift to see how wonderful an us we would be. But when you—"

I swallowed as I looked up in to his eyes, feeling the ache which settled over me each Christmas when I thought not only of all the loved ones we had lost at that time of year, but also of how close I had come to losing him.

His Adam's apple bobbed with his emotion. "America, is that how you felt when I got shot? Like your world went from color to black and white in an instant? Like every flavor you'd ever tasted had been zapped from your memory? Like every laugh you'd ever shared with anyone had just turned sour?"

I clutched at his hand, unable to speak as I nodded.

He pulled me into an embrace which nearly crushed me as if he would never, could never let go. "I don't know what I would have done—"

I clung to him with the same fervor.

"You should ask Aspen," he said with a half-hearted chuckle as he wiped at his eyes which were dripping tears like rain. "I was a wreck while you were in surgery. I couldn't even think to try and keep myself together for the kids."

"It fits," I said as I offered my husband a sad smile. "Aspen was the one who finally told me that you weren't, in fact, dead like I believed you to be after the guards took me to the hospital wing. It would seem he's very good at picking up the pieces of our broken hearts."

Maxon's gaze was distant before he looked down at me, staggering me with the weight of his potential grief. "America, I beg of you," he breathed as if his words were a promise that he could require of me. "Don't ever leave me. I don't think I could take it."

I didn't answer; I couldn't make a promise that I wasn't absolutely certain I could keep. After working so hard to be worthy of his trust, I wasn't willing to throw all of that away even for a promise which might ease his mind for a moment.

Instead, I brought his hand up to my chest, like mine had gone to his on more than one occasion. "I'm still here," I whispered as I stood there, one hand wrapped around his on my chest. "And my heart is still working."

Maxon leaned his ear to my chest as if he couldn't trust his fingers to tell them that I was fine.

I ran my fingers through his hair, and he looked up at me after a moment as if he was grateful for the gift of my heartbeat. I must have looked like I wanted him to kiss me because he gave me a look like he would do anything for me as he leaned his lips up toward mine.

We staggered backward onto the bed as our lips met in wave after wave of crashing need.

There had been times early in our marriage when I had believed that kissing Maxon was like breathing, like life without him would be impossible.

But these kisses were more than that. They were electric and sparking, not like the wildfires of passion we'd indulged in as newlyweds, but more like the controlled life-giving electric shocks which pulsed through our hearts and kept us tethered to this earth, to this life, to each other.

One could live without air, if only for a few moments.

One couldn't live without the electrical current pulsing between one's brain and heart.

And both my mind and my heart resided in my husband and in the life we had shared.

"Whatever else may come, it's been a good life," I said with a smile.

"That it has, my Queen," he said with a nod.

As silly as it might sound, it just killed me whenever he called me that. Even though it wasn't technically true anymore.

"Should I call you my cowboy?" I asked, fingering the belt loop on his new jeans.

Maxon snorted, and I grinned as he leaned in and kissed me. "I don't think anyone else in the kingdom could even pretend to say that with as straight a face as you just managed."

I giggled as a knock on the door interrupted us both.

"Daddy?"

The voice on the other side of the door made me raise an eyebrow in surprise. "What's Eadlyn doing here?" I asked, looking over at my husband.

He shrugged as he sat up straighter, almost trying to appear more regal once again. "Maybe she has a question?"

I nodded at the possibility. She'd only been queen for two weeks and engaged to be married for half that time. She probably had a question or two for one or both of us.

The butler hurried to the door and greeted her with a low bow. "Your Majesty."

She walked into the room with a smile. Then, she looked over at us. "Dad, Osten came in and said you needed to—"

Her voice trailed off and her eyes widened. "Daddy, are you wearing jeans?"

Maxon turned an amused half-smile to me and then back to our daughter. "I didn't call you, Eady. I think Osten just wanted you to get pulled away from your very important workload just so you could ask that question."

I laughed, burying my face into my husband's shoulder as tears of laughter ran down my cheeks. I'd never let my youngest son know just how much I appreciated his antics.

"Osten knew you were wearing jeans?" Eadlyn asked, her eyebrows rocketing sky-high.

"Kaden too," I added, helpfully.

"Was anyone not invited besides me?" Eadlyn asked, looking between the two of us.

"Ahren," we both said in unison.

She rolled her eyes. "Seeing as he's in France, it would have been a challenge to get him here for such a momentous occasion."

Maxon turned to me, "Do you think Silvia would have a protocol for the former King wearing his first pair of jeans?"

I snorted. "Probably. She had protocol for everything!"

Eadlyn let her eyes wander between us, a satisfied smile on her lips. "I'm gonna go back to running the country. You two, you just—"

She swallowed down what I suspected might be happy tears. She'd confessed to me on more than one occasion that she was just happy to be able to help Maxon and me get some much-needed rest and relaxation, and I was indebted to her for it. "You two just enjoy your retirement."

"In our jeans," Maxon said with a grin.

"Mom's wearing jeans too?" Eadlyn squeaked as if she couldn't fathom it.

"It's a topsy turvy world, Your Majesty," I said with a shrug and a laugh.

She laughed and shook her head. "I'm going to get back to running the country now."

As she slipped out the door, Maxon turned to me with a devilishly sneaky look in his eye. "Now, where were we?" he asked, pinning me on the bed.

I giggled as he kissed me, his kisses trailing down to my neck as his fingers fumbled at my blouse. "Right about here," I agreed as I wrapped my arms around his neck.


End file.
